This research assessed poaching risks associated with endangered species in Indonesia, examined stakeholder perceptions of risk, and situational factors associated with poaching-related crimes. Wildlife poaching is a global risk that threatens biological, ecological, economic, and socio-cultural systems. Poaching has become increasingly more organized, violent, and lucrative and is now considered a serious threat to regional and global security in addition to biodiversity conservation. As a biodiversity hotspot with the fourth largest human population, Indonesia faces numerous conservation and development challenges including poaching. The contemporary upsurge in wildlife poaching has led to the conservation community to substantially increase traditional enforcement efforts (e.g., rangers, patrols) with a growing acknowledgment of the need to develop more diverse responses to wildlife crime prevention. Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) is a pragmatic application of criminological-based opportunity theories and is appealing for application to poaching because of the immediacy of crime reduction and the proactive, rather than reactive, nature of the techniques aimed to reduce criminal opportunities. Advancing SCP applications within the context of wildlife poaching answers calls to diversify the response, draws on a substantial body of knowledge within criminology, and could provide much needed cost-efficient poaching reduction in the short term. This research merged theory from risk and decision sciences, criminology, and natural resource management to bridge this conservation and criminology gap by using the SCP framework to guide research with field-based conservation practitioners and communities surrounding Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (BBSNP) in Sumatra, Indonesia. The broad research objectives of this research were to: 1) Investigate the dimensions of wildlife guardianship (i.e., willingness to intervene) and influence of demographic variables and interdisciplinary constructs (e.g., crime seriousness, risk perception, wildlife value orientations) on intentions to serve as a wildlife guardian; 2) Develop an interdisciplinary, wildlife target suitability model that could serve as an explanatory and predictive tool for understanding poaching within BBSNP; and 3) Use the SCP framework to guide a focus group with conservation practitioners to describe the characteristics that make Sumatran tigers suitable as a poaching target, poacher modus operandi, and to brainstorm strategies under an expanded suite of techniques for SCP. Data herein provide novel understanding about the willingness of residents in BBSNP communities to intervene as wildlife guardians, advances an ecologically-informed model to understand and predict species-specific targeting by poachers, and captures conservation practitioners’ rapid assessment of the SCP of tiger poaching including identification of priority spaces within and around BBSNP where developed techniques need to be implemented. In producing new knowledge this research makes theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions to the extant literature on guardianship, target suitability models, and the SCP framework within the context of wildlife poaching.
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